SapienStone and KRAM/WEISSHAAR's collaboration is heating things up in the kitchen

My body now reacts in a visceral, often painful way to any product with the word 'smart' slapped in front of it, but the SMART SLAB from SapienStone is actually pretty smart—in concept, at least.

Debuted at Milan Design Week earlier this year, SMART SLAB is a table from SapienStone that integrates heating, cooling and sensor technologies directly into its surface. The product of a partnership with Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram of Munich and Stockholm-based design firm KRAM/WEISSHAAR, the table takes the durable, highly-engineered porcelain panels SapienStone is known for—resistant to household wear and tear as well as chemicals, stains, and anything else nature throws their way—and adds a stratum of technology underneath, creating a customizable table that can heat, cool, cook and even charge your phone.

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"The idea to turn [SapienStone's ceramic tiles] into smart slabs came when SapienStone approached our office to think about what could be done with these quite amazing tiles," Weisshaar says. "We went and visited the factory and almost instantly thought of adding a layer of technology to the back of the tile."

With a penchant for blending new technologies into their work, KRAM/WEISSHAAR was eager to explore what that could look like for SapienStone's tiles and jumped at the opportunity to re-imagine the future of kitchen design. "The table is a technology demonstrator—a pace car for a new technology, basically," Weisshaar says. "While studying the potential of technology integration into the tiles, we decided to narrow our initial focus to the kitchen and we quickly realized that discreet technologies have great potential to fundamentally challenge the kitchens of today."

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The duo began by building out an extensive catalogue of technologies they considered relevant. "From a variety of sensors to actuators, charging units, cameras, sprinklers and so on," Weisshaar says. They settled on a few elements (heating, cooling elements, cooking, and device charging) that made the most useful upgrades and seemed feasible to integrate into the surface of SapienStone's panels. Afterward, Weisshaar and Kram worked with a team of designers, mechanical engineers, electronics engineers and programmers across their offices in Stockholm and Munich to bring the table to life.

"Like with our other technology-centric projects—such as Robochop, OUTRACE or the R18 Ultra Chair—we were interested in making things actually work," Weisshaar says. "Our whole process is driven by the goal of achieving a fully functioning prototype. This means everything from the mechanical hardware, electronic hardware, tooling, assembly considerations, material choices, industrial design, interaction design and coding elements need to be deeply integrated. Otherwise, you never gain the pace and momentum necessary to pull off a project like this. We call this 'steam cooking' and we make it a priority to switch from 'think tank' mode to 'do tank' after two months of design and planning."

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So, what does it take to make a ceramic tile smart? Turns out, quite a few components. The main piece is the slab itself is a 6 millimeter thick (or rather, thin) tile up to 3 by 1.5 meters in size. For the SMART SLAB, a 0.8 by 3 meter sheet (produced in Modena, Italy) is used. SapienStone mixes the base component for the ceramic—a mixture of feldspar, quartz, and various sands—before pressing it out into slabs. The final slabs are fired, glazed and then fired again in a long kiln stretching 450 meters. Lastly, the surface is diamond polished.

Then, structural components milled from aerospace-grade aluminum are sandblasted, anodized and anchored to the slab, serving a double purpose as a heat sink to all the semiconductors and control systems directly attached to the underside of the table. The table can be outfitted with panels for inductive cooking, Peltier elements for cooling, resistor-based heating units for warming, touch sensors and even LEDs for backlighting. "The SapienStone ceramic slab is so thin that the LED lighting units of our control unit shine through," Weisshaar says. Future explorations include induction-based wireless charging, as well.

Legs and pull rods are attached to the aluminum backbone and all the components are surrounded by an insulating layer of foam—or as Weisshaar describes, "the tabletop sandwich." The entire assembly is then sealed at the bottom with a shell of hot-pressed, fiber-reinforced, recycled PET. The final table clocks in just under 70 kilograms (roughly 154 pounds). "We tried to build the thinnest and most lightweight table possible," Weisshaar says.

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SMART SLAB's are created on demand, currently only available for ordering through SapienStone's website. From there, users can take their pick of a selection of modular units, including heating and cooling units, inductive cooking and charging modules. Using an online portal, users can quickly select the material and functions of their choosing to create their own custom SMART SLAB. Each custom SMART SLAB is produced by Iris Ceramica Group in their fully automated factory in Modena, Italy before being sent out to the customer.

Marketed as offering the ability to keep guests' dishes at a precise temperature while keeping champagne bottles perfectly chilled, KRAM/WEISSHAAR view the SMART SLAB as a first step to what is possible with this technology and see it being used in kitchen counters, as well as a range of other surfaces.

"Technology in buildings is still integrated on site and by craftsmen," Weisshaar says. "Moving the wiring of a wall into an industrial environment will boost speed and cost of construction massively." KRAM/WEISSHAAR envisions a future where every household surface has this type of technology, depending on the diverse needs of different spaces.

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Attendees of Milan Design Week got a firsthand look at SMART SLAB, where chef Massimo Bottura used one to cook an exclusive dinner held in the Sala del Tiepolo of Palazzo Clerici. In the meantime, those looking to charge their phone while chilling their champagne will need to hang tight—there is currently only a limited edition of SMART SLABS available and no set price for future editions.

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Carly Ayres is a partner at HAWRAF, a new design studio in New York. She used to pen "In the Details," Core77's weekly deep-dive into the making of a new product or project. Along the way, she's covered rugs with dinosaurs, shrink-wrapped buildings, kinetic military boots, and a myriad of other topics that can just barely be classified as industrial design. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in New York.

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